If you are going to handle credit card information online then that means that your customers and clients are entrusting you with highly sensitive information. As that payment card information is essentially a gateway to their bank accounts they are to an extent essentially trusting you with their entire finances and their whole bank account. It is thus highly important that you make sure you get this right and that you are highly careful with that information. Here we will look at how to do that and how to avoid letting your customers down †which potentially could lead to a high profile case that damages your reputation and the perception the general public have of you. First of all it is highly important to make sure that the actual transfer of information is secure. When your customers enter their details, and when they click buy etc those details are sent online and that means that they could in theory be intercepted by someone who had the right means. The main way to avoid this problem is to use encryption, which means that all of the information going either way is encrypted and that the data is therefore safe in most cases. If you use an internet merchant account then you will be outsourcing this service and the internet merchant account will take care of the exchange of data for you †sending and receiving that information and allowing you to do eCommerce without worrying about the encryption etc. this way you can be sure that the data is secure without having to learn a lot about data security. This means that you can meet the payment card industry standards that permit you to do eCommerce without having to actual concern yourself with the details. Your internet merchant account should also contain the details for you †allowing your customers and clients to input their data just once and return to make purchases, or so that they can set up a standing order that is carried out automatically (only some internet merchant accounts do this and only in some cases will you want to offer this option). This means that they will be storing the card details for you so that you again don't need to worry about them. However in some cases you might still store the financial and personal information of customers and clients yourself. For instance you might store their information so that you can contact them in future with certain offers, or just as back up. Again to meet the PCI standards and to avoid security risks you need to be highly careful here. If you are storing your information digitally then you need to have all the very latest hardware and software to make hacking as difficult as possible. You also need to think about the small security measures such as passwords an user names and put just as much thought into these. Legally, you must never store the information of customers or clients without express permission, and likewise you must not ever share that information with other businesses.
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